Is Oxy's President Next?
Occidental College is the latest campus to join the domino effect of students calling for the firing of top administrators. One of the activists occupying the office of the vice president since Monday is Olivia Davis, who outlines here the demands of Oxy United for Black Liberation, which include “Hir[ing] much needed physicians of color at Emmons Wellness Center to treat physical and emotional trauma associated with issues of identity” and the immediate removal of President Jonathan Veitch:
As a white, cis, affluent, heterosexual man he has the privilege to not have to consider the violence I face everyday. … [T]his movement is a manifestation of the daily microaggressions, discrimination, and other facets of marginalization we come to know as our college experience. It looks like a white student cussing me out my freshman year, calling me stupid when I told him that he couldn’t essentialize the existence of Black people to struggling through crime and poverty in “the hood.” It also looks like the time that I heard an entire room of white students say n***a at a party my first year. It’s the time that my professor refused to speak up in class when a white student referred to black men as “threatening and violent.” And again the time that I watched womxn -- black womxn -- around me encounter gross amounts of misogynoir when reporting their sexual assaults. It is everyday that I have to walk through this institution internalizing all of the psychic violence enacted on black students and students of color that makes me believe that I do not belong here.
As students, we are willing to let our academic performance suffer in order to ensure our survival. This is why creating safe spaces and protecting marginalized students should be the responsibility of the administration.
In the op-ed, Davis doesn’t cite anything that Veitch did to trigger the calls for his ouster, not even something as small a poorly worded email that forced out Claremont McKenna’s dean, an impolitic remark that precipitated the removal of Mizzou’s president, or an email about Halloween costumes that threatened the jobs of two faculty members at Yale. The most tangible thing Davis cites: “Veitch has been given over 49 demands from three different groups of students; only 3 of those demands have been met.” (The full list isn’t provided.) And she completely dismisses the defense of Veitch by the chair of the Board of Trustees:
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This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
